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May 07, 2010

D_Davis rated it:

Gully Foyle - the rapist, the louse, the uneducated buffoon, the gutter punk, the idiot driven by pure rage, by violence, and by his blood-quest for revenge - through an experience with life and humanity ushers forth a new age of faith, hope, and religion in a world where these things have been abolished and stripped away by men driven and compelled to treat the masses like children; Foyle gives the people the key to their own destinies by having faith in humanity. "I've handed life and de More...

14 comments like (30 people liked it)

Feb 09, 2012

Dulac3 rated it:

Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

Sci-fi from its formative days is funny. Not funny ha-ha (not always anyway), but funny-weird…at least for me. I am often unable to get over the clunky writing and wispy plots despite the many cool ideas on display. Sometimes even a premise as cool as a galaxy-spanning empire held together by the prods and pokes of a few cognoscenti using an arcane sociological science sti More...

12 comments like (17 people liked it)

Jun 01, 2011

Catie rated it:

I think that this book pretty much just blew my mind. I mean, am I crazy, or is this one of the most profound things ever written?

"You pigs, you. You goof like pigs, is all. You got the most in you and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you….”

Alright, you probably have to read the book to appreciate that, and you should! Can More...

7 comments like (18 people liked it)

Oct 10, 2011

mark rated it:

¡WOW BOB WOW! GULLY FOYLE IS FAST AND FURIOUS! A MADMAN OUT FOR VENGEANCE, LEFT FOR DEAD NOT ONCE BUT TWICE! HE IS HUMAN JUGGERNAUT, HE IS FORCE MAJEURE, HE IS BOTH ROCK AND HARD PLACE! HE HURTLES THROUGH SPACE AND TIME AND MISADVENTURE AND MANY DISGUISES, A LOVER AND A RAPIST, THE MOST VIOLENT MAN IN THE ROOM, THE ANGRIEST BOY EVER, A HUMAN TIMEBOMB, HIS FACIAL TATTOOS: A TIGER, A TIGER! BURNING BRIGHT! THE ONLY GIRL FOR HIM - ANOTHER SOCIOPATH! - THE ONLY DESTINATION FOR HIM - THE STARS! LITER More...

4 comments like (20 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Adam rated it:

Fast and furious and blackly comedic similiar to early Vonnegut or Jack Vance mixed with the bitter surrealism of Finney's "Circus of Doctor Lao", this book predicted and influenced trends like the British New Wave,cyberpunk, and new space opera, but retains an oddball flavor of its own. Satirizing 50's anxieties like the red scare and the threat of nuclear annihilation(and unhindered corporate greed and warmongering)and featuring a psychopathic protagonist(loose in world that makes hi More...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Dec 20, 2011

Scott rated it:

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place,
The stars my destination.

Gully Foyle is one of the most memorable anti-heroes of science fiction I have ever read. He is an unpleasant but strangely fascinating character that lies, betrays, rapes and brutalizes his way towards seeking revenge. Foyle starts out as a grunting animal that only adopts more sophisticated techniques when brute force fails to be effective in achieving revenge. Tw More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 10, 2008

Sandi rated it:

I have two thoughts on "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. One is that it really reads modern for a book written in 1956. The other is that it has some really antiquated ideas about the future.

First for the positive. For the first 200 of the 250 or so pages of the story, I couldn't stand the protagonist, Gulliver Foyle. However, he grows as a human being to the point that I ended up spending the last 50 pages cheering him on. Bester did an excellent job of tak More...

3 comments like (12 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Mark rated it:

Interesting book, not only because of the story but because it was written before man had travelled to outer space so the author's notions of how it would work are entertaining.

Basically in the future everyone can teleport at will, with limitations. The changes this causes in society are explored by the author and create a strange but compelling alternate reality.

The story is fast-paced and rarely dull. The last several chapters are nice and heavy. The only reason I do More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 18, 2011

Jason rated it:

Totally mind-blowing and unlike anything I have ever had the pleasure of reading. I can't offer any constructive criticism and can only say, "wow, just wow." Ok, a few more thoughts then:

I still can't believe this novel was written in 1956! There are some fairly risque subject matter, violence and profanity that Bester gets away with that must have been controversial for its time but I don't even know if this novel was popular when it was first published. I'm still trying More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Sep 11, 2011

Apatt rated it:

I first read this book decades ago under the title of Tiger! Tiger! (British edition). I just reread it recently for the purposes of writing this review. Fortunately I have memory like a sieve so I enjoy this reread just as much as the first time.

The Stars My Destination is one of the few sf books that is included in almost every all-time best sf books I have ever seen, and I have seen many. If I see such a list without this book I will probably dismiss it.

The story is ce More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 13, 2008

Zepp rated it:

I can easily align myself with readers who view this novel as a seminal transition between the Golden Age and the New Wave, but I can't quite swallow its iconic status, at least not as a transcendant work of ideas.
Clearly Bester is going for a new history of the future, and I love the rogue and revolver bravado, but his puzzler-subtlety-sinks-the-punchline formula is no more trenchant than an episode of Star Trek or Twilight Zone (I love both).
Which is not to say that I didn't reli More...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 23, 2008

Cloudwalker rated it:

The Stars My Destination

by Alfred Bester

Yes, another old scifi novel, and one of the best imho. There is no doubt that Mr. Bester knows how to tell a story, and that is by letting his characters tell it for him.

Gully Foyle is a remarkable creation. When we are introduced to him, he is marooned in space, the last surviving crewman of a horrific accidental bombing (there's an interplanetary war going on, and his ship was apparently in the wrong place at the wro More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 28, 2008

Sachin rated it:

As SF availability in India is limited, i asked my wife to get few books from London. And this was one of them. She had to visit quite a few stores to find it. Half way through the book i was wondering if the effort she put in was worth it. Till half the book it was just a regular who done it to me or a revenge tale. At times well written and well paced, at times ordinary. But later part of the book made me change my opinion. Things start happening and story develops. But i also think that fir More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 21, 2007

Liam rated it:

Am I a bad person for only just thinking this book was just OK? It was written in the 50s and not having a good grasp of the development of science fiction I'm not sure what or if ideas in the book were groundbreaking or not. Maybe it was just over hyped (I read the SF Masterworks edition). I will say this, up until the last two chapters I wasn't too intrigued by the books premises. However the second to last chapter includes an interesting attempt at describing synthesia (the neurological condi More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2009

Ethan rated it:

On a recent flight, I read the in-flight magazine and an article by Keith Ferrell on great science fiction literature. He laid out his criteria and then rank-ordered 15-16 essential works of science fiction. I had not read most of them, but based on reputation, I think it’s a decent list.

Number four jumped out to me: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Ferrell called it, “Arguably the greatest science fiction adventure novel ever written.” I’ve heard about this book a few times More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 11, 2011

Erica rated it:

I haven't read straight spaceship style sci-fi in a while, and it's REALLY FUN. Or maybe this book is just REALLY GOOD. I learned that it is impossible to relay the plot of a book like this without sounding like a total nerd though (sample: "so, like, after barely surviving and living in an abandoned spaceship wreck in deep space for months he finds this forgotten asteroid society built out of old spaceships, where they give him a wife and a bunch of crazy devil tiger tattoos while he's kn More...

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Oct 08, 2011

07michaelA rated it:

Michael Adkins
Prd 7, English 9
October 8, 2011
The Stars My Destination
By Alfred Bester
252 pages

The Stars My Destination is the story of a man’s struggle to both survive the world in which he lives and to seek vengeance for what has happened upon him. This is the story of Gully Foyle, an average day crewman born unto no education with a poor use for grammar often referred to as gutter tongue. Gully is the last known survivor of the Nomad, a merchant spac More...

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Oct 03, 2011

Ariel rated it:

My partner Lambert and I had a brief debate about The Stars My Destination last night because he thought the book was cryptic and silly, and I loved it. I see why many SF authors consider The Stars My Destination to be the best SF novel. It may not be my favorite book ever, but I loved reading it. It was a intellectually stimulating and a quick page-turner at the same time. It is one of the earlier works of SF I have read that considers how human advancement radically changes what it means t More...

0 comments like

Sep 08, 2011

Fungus rated it:

This story never really quite gets above the level of an interesting tale. The opening pages are great, and it looks as if the yarn itself might at least reach heroic proportions, but the writing and ambition never regain that level. There are flashes of it--in the passage about the Scientific People and the Four Mile Circus--but it is nothing like sustained. The story seems at times invented as written<spoiler>--the holocaust to be touched off by Foyle, promised in the early pages, nev More...

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Aug 05, 2011

Samuel rated it:

One of my favorite reads (currently at #1), "The Stars my Destination" feels like an action packed Hollywood SF adventure. The main character is anything but a hero (he grunts, he rapes, he kills, he has a lethal obsession with revenge, he doesn't even keep the girl at the end... any girl), and it's surprising that such a tale could be published to so much success back in the 1950's. One of the reasons is how creative the world is just by adding one twist: humans can now teleport with More...

0 comments like

Jul 29, 2011

Wolverina rated it:

This was a comment on someone's review, left in the lj community sf_with_bite.

Interesting review!

I'd only just finished reading the book when you posted this. You do seem to have enjoyed it a lot more than me. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy this book a lot, just that I found it very flawed, with nothing extrodinary to make up for that.

For me, it was built up (on the cover, with an introduction by Neil Gaimen etc...) as going to be the best SF novel I've ever read. More...

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Jun 24, 2011

The Man In The Hat rated it:

"[Y]ou can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river ... " Neil Gaiman, from the afterword of the "SF Masterworks" edition I have of The Stars My Destination.

When I first read this book some ten years ago, I found it to be brilliant. I had never read anything like it and turned my understanding of print sci-fi around and opened so many doors for me that previously I never even knew existed. I had previously believed that Science Fict More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 26, 2010

Dan rated it:

“Education: None. Skills: None. Merits: None.” So reads Gully Foyle’s Merchant Marine card. But, Gully has managed to survive for 170 days in the airless purgatory of deep space and to Escape to Terra with a murderous grudge and a secret that could change the course of history. In this pulse-quickening novel, Bester imagines a future in which people “jaunte” a thousand miles with a single thought, where the rich barricade themselves in labyrinths and protect themselves with radioactive hit More...

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Jul 16, 2010

Bart rated it:

This book was published in 1956 – a time when traveling to the moon would still be science fiction for quite a few years.

Many of its ideas were astonishing then and its plot of blind revenge facilitated by technology could easily be translated into a modern tale that would be brilliant. The story arc related to an analogue to nuclear weapons obviously reflects the reality of life in 1956 -- barely a decade after the first use of nuclear weapons in war.

The hero of the boo More...

0 comments like

Apr 06, 2010

Nick rated it:

I wrote a longer review and than accidentally deleted it. GOSH.

anyways, I really liked it, it has stood the test of time better than any book I have ever read, and it spares no punches. This book is a remarkably quick read, and one of the few books I wouldn't have minded if it was longer. It has some amazingly interesting vingnettes. the whole part about people paying to have their brain "disconnected" was incredible!! The last chapter is breathtaking.

I gott More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 28, 2009

Cyrano rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 23, 2009

Mike rated it:

While something of a genre classic my introduction to The Stars My Destination was somewhat roundabout since I first heard the book mentioned on the video game/humor-centric podcast from the guys at Mega64. Co-founder of Mega64 Derrick “Derek” Acosta seemed pretty impressed with the title and his description of the plot sounded interesting. I circled the title for almost a year before finally breaking down and buying a copy, and man am I glad I did.

The Stars My Destination begins More...

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Apr 16, 2009

Sisimka rated it:

From the back cover: “EDUCATION: NONE. SKILLS: NONE. MERITS: NONE. RECOMMENDATIONS: NONE” So reads Gully Foyle’s Merchant Marine card. But Gully has managed to survive for 170 days in the airless purgatory of deep space and to escape to Terra with a murderous grudge and a secret that could change the course of history…

…’The Stars My Destination’ is a classic of technological prophecy and timeless narrative enchantment by an acknowledged master of science fiction.

Marooned in More...

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Dec 26, 2011

Danielmatuk rated it:

I was intrigued from just the description of the book. This was a very quick exciting story written in the 50s about a future that could be. The advent of "jaunting" alone sets the pace for this story as it changes life for the human race as it stretches out to the stars.

As I was reading this book I couldn't help but think some of the ideas were really ahead of their time. Jaunting alone is most likely an idea that has existed since man first grasped the concept of trans More...

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Oct 16, 2011

Avel rated it:

Firstly, recommended to me by a Peter Brown. An absolute classic, without question the finest science fiction novel of the 1950s and arguably the greatest SF novel, period. Bester creates an extraordinarily detailed and exotic future society in which to set the tale of Gully Foyle, a man who is driven to greatness by his passion for revenge. Above all, this novel is about the price of obsession, and the responsibility of power. It has been out of print for ages. Buy it. Read it. If you have neve More...

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